iEvoBio

This year’s event will occur after the meeting on June 23, from 9 am to 5 pm at the Convention Center. Watch this space for calls for participation!

In Brief

The Meeting

This year’s theme is “Creating sustainable careers.” We will have two sessions, morning and afternoon. The morning session look broadly at sustainable software development in biology departments. First, we will have a panel discussing how researchers can build an evolutionary biology career that includes computation and software development. For example, for early career computational evolutionary biologists, how can you ensure that you receive credit commensurate with your efforts? For lab heads and PIs, how can you support and mentor your personnel to help them achieve their goals when their research includes software work?

Following this, we will have a discussion of creating manageable software workflows for large and distributed teams. Topics may include continuous integration testing of software, team communication, and onboarding of personnel into the development workflow.

The afternoon session will be an education session focused on creating course content scaffolds. How can computation be woven into the curriculum such that students are exposed to computational thinking alongside biology throughout the curriculum. In this session, we will discuss the “code to learn” style of learning, in which writing code is done to emphasize the biological side of learning. We will also have content on helping faculty colleagues get on board with teaching computational exercises in their classrooms, even when they themselves are not expert programmers.

Registration will be $85 for for faculty and professional attendees registering in conjunction with the Evolution meetings. Registration will be $30 for graduate students and postdocs in conjunction with the Evolution meetings.

Registration will be handled via the main conference registration site.

How to submit a proposal for a Software Bazaar

As in previous years, we will coordinate a Software Bazaar for attendees to show off software they work on. More information to come.

We are going coordinate this pre-conference discussion through GitHub. GitHub is a website that can be used to share source code. It also provides a nice forum-like discussion tool through “issues”. We ask anyone who would like to present to the Software Bazaar to open an issue. The issue is prepopulated with a template for each of the possible proposal types. Fill in the appropriate inputs for your submission. Each iEvoBio participant can submit one lighting talk and one Software bazaar proposal.

We encourage all users to discuss these topics, find like-minded people to work with at iEvoBio or make contact with software developers for whom you have questions. The discussions on GitHub are subject to our Code of Conduct.

Student Travel

We will have some funds to remunerate students to extend their stay at the meeting for this event. Watch this space for more info!